Susanne von Paczensky (1923–2010)

Susanne von Paczensky, née Czapski, was born in Augsburg, Germany and grew up in Berlin. Her father Hans Czapski was a high ranking government official and her mother Veronika Erdmann-Czapski was a well-known poet. After the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933, Susanne was often insulted at school for her father's Jewish origins, but allowed to graduate. In 1941, under a false identity, she began studying law in Freiburg, where she had contact with resistance groups and wrote underground leaflets. She had to abandon her studies when her documents were exposed, and she went into hiding until the end of World War II. She worked as an interpreter for the American military, and then joined the news agency DANA in Bad Nauheim, where she was selected from the editorial staff to cover the Major War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg. She was one of the very few women journalists accredited to the trials. From 1947 to 1949, she was an editor of the Hamburg daily newspaper Die Weit, where she met her husband Gert von Paczensky, the political editor, with whom she had two children. In 1949, the couple went to London, where her husband worked as the paper's foreign correspondent, and then to Paris. On their return to Germany in 1958, Susanne became a freelance journalist for several magazines, supported the student movements of 1968, and became active in the women's movement. In 1969, following a divorce, and nearly 50 years old, she went back to school to study sociology at the University of Hamburg. From 1977 to 1983, she was the editor of a feminist book series called Frauen aktuell (Women Current), on topics such as domestic violence, women in government, and Turkish women in Germany. In 1981, at age 58, she earned her PhD in sociology with a dissertation that was published that year under the title Verschwiegene Liebe (Secretive Love). In 1982, she founded the Hamburg family planning center. In the late 1980s, deeply disturbed by the upcoming reunification of Germany, she moved to the USA, settling in Berkeley, California. There she wrote for Time, Brigitte, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on topics such as the prison system in the United States and the death penalty. Eventually, she retuned to live in Hamburg again.